Chart showing the US Navys interpretation of the events of the first part of the Gulf of Tonkin incident The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was originally presented as a pair of battles initiated by North Vietnamese gunboats without provocation against two U.S. destroyers, that took place in August of 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin. Accounts and details regarding the incident remain unreconciled; the official account is countered by claims that the attack was mere political stagecraft.
Similar near-incidents are considered to have been provoked by attacks of the South Vietnamese on the North, with planning and support from the US. Because the accounts of the attack were officially promulgated by the US, the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" is often seen in the US as an unchallenged fact. However, critics of the established view claim that the Johnson administration sensationalised or outright fabricated the incident, to craft a pretext for publicly increasing its already active covert involvement in Vietnam.
Photograph taken from the USS Maddox August 2, 1962 showing North Vietnamese patrolboats Immediately after the incident, President Lyndon Johnson called upon Congress to approve the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which effectively authorized the president to begin the American escalation of the Vietnam War.
Official description of events
On July 31, 1964, the American destroyer USS Maddox (DD-731) began a reconnaissance mission in the Gulf of Tonkin. The official purpose of the mission was to obtain information about North Vietnamese coastal defense forces. Other similar U.S. ships were involved in supporting South Vietnamese commando raids on the North Vietnamese coast during the same period.
On August 2, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats, mistaking the Maddox for a South Vietnamese vessel, launched a torpedo and machine gun attack on it. Responding immediately to the attack, the Maddox, with the help of air support from the nearby carrier Ticonderoga, destroyed one of the attacking boats and damaged the other two. The Maddox, suffering only superficial damage by a single machine gun bullet, retired to South Vietnamese waters where she was joined by the C. Turner Joy.
On August 4, a new DESOTO patrol to North Vietnam coast was launched by Maddox and the C. Turner Joy. The latter got radar signals that they believed to be another attack by the North Vietnamese. For some two hours the ships fired on radar targets and maneuvered vigorously amid electronic and visual reports of torpedoes. It is highly unlikely that any North Vietnamese forces were actually in the area during this gunfight. Captain John J. Herrick even admitted that it was nothing more than an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing ship's own propeller beat." Also in 1995, General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander-in-chief of North Vietnamese forces at the time, disavowed any involvement with the August 4 incident, though he did confirm the August 2 attack.
Contradicted claims
According to the official description, increased U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War came in 1964, with a program of covert South Vietnamese operations, designed to impose "progressively escalating pressure" upon the North, and initiated on a small and essentially ineffective scale in February. The active U.S. role in the few covert operations that were carried out was limited essentially to planning, equipping, and training of the South Vietnamese forces involved, but U.S. responsibility for the launching and conduct of these activities was unequivocal and carried with it an implicit symbolic and psychological intensification of the U.S. commitment.
Noam Chomsky, among others, disputes the above sequence of events, contending that active military US involvement actually began as early as 1961 (with operations beginning in 1962) and that the August 4 incident was in fact a fabrication, crafted by the Johnson administration so the U.S. could claim, for the benefit of the American public, that the North Vietnamese bore full guilt for starting open hostilities. Though information obtained well after the fact indicates that there was actually no North Vietnamese attack that night, U.S. authorities say they were convinced at the time that an attack had taken place, and reacted by sending planes from the carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation to hit North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases and fuel facilities.
Regarding claims that the attacks on the US were unprovoked, veterans of US Navy SEAL teams say that US-trained South Vietnamese commandos were active in the area on the days of the attacks. Deployed from Da Nang in Norwegian-built fast patrol boats, the Lien Doc Nguoi Nhia, LDNN, (soldiers that fight under the sea), made attacks in the Gulf area on both of the nights in question.
On July 31, LDNN in "Nastys" (the name commandos give to the fast attack boats) attacked a radio transmitter on the island of Hon Nieu. On Aug. 3, they used an 88mm mortar to attack a radar site at Cape Vinh Son. The North Vietnamese responded by attacking hostile ships visible in the area. While US officials were less than honest about the full extent of hostilities that led to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, critical claims that a naval commander fired weapons solely to create an international incident tend to overlook circumstances and opportunistic responses that suggest a less intentional motivation.
Daniel Ellsberg, who was on duty in the Pentagon that night receiving messages from the ship, reports that the ships were on a secret mission, codenamed DeSoto Patrols, inside North Vietnamese territorial waters. Their purpose was to provoke the North Vietnamese into turning on their coastal defense radar so they could be plotted. This constitutes an act of war by the United States against North Vietnam.
Squadron commander James Stockdale was one of the U.S. pilots flying overhead August 4. In the 1990s Stockdale stated:
"[I] had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets -- there were no PT boats there.... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power."
In 1995, retired Vietnamese General Nguyen Giap meeting with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, categorically denied that Vietnamese gunboats had attacked American destroyers 1964August 4. A taped conversation was released in 2001 of a meeting several weeks after passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, revealing that Robert McNamara expressed doubts to President Johnson that the attack had even occurred.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
Lyndon Johnson, who was up for election that year, launched retaliatory strikes and went on national television on August 4. Although the Maddox had been involved in providing support for South Vietnamese attacks at Hon Me and Hon Ngu, Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, went before Congress and denied that the United States Navy was supporting South Vietnamese military operations. He thus characterized the attack as "unprovoked." Despite the fact that there was no second attack, he also claimed before Congress that there was "unequivocable proof" of an "unprovoked" second attack against the Maddox.
As a result of McNamara's testimony, on August 7 Congress passed a Joint Resolution (H.J. RES 1145), known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, that facilitated increased U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The Resolution was approved by the House unanimously (416-0), and by the Senate 88-2, with Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska casting the only nay votes. Although there was never a formal declaration of war, the Resolution gave President Johnson approval "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom." Both Johnson and President Richard Nixon used the Resolution as a justification for escalated involvement in Indochina.
The Resolution was repealed in June of 1970, with the help of Judge Glenn Smith II, in response to the Nixon Administration's military operations in Cambodia. The U.S. had already begun the process of withdrawing troops from the area in 1969, under a policy known as "Vietnamization", but did not completely disengage from the region until 1975, after the North Vietnamese take-over of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. The Resolution was replaced by the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which is still in place today..
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